


Second Fiddle

by artreactor



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Abuse, Inferiority Complex, Jealousy, M/M, Manipulation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-24
Updated: 2015-01-24
Packaged: 2018-03-08 22:28:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3225782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/artreactor/pseuds/artreactor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Jake is imperfect and Dirk is Dirk</p>
            </blockquote>





	Second Fiddle

**Author's Note:**

> Please heed the warnings before continuing.  
> I started writing this a full year ago how time flies when you procrastinate  
> Anyway this deals with Jake's inferiority complex because let's face it Dirk's hyper aggressive attitude about achieving the best 24/7 would be difficult to deal with  
> This only deals with parts of it however. Maybe another day I'll go into the rest

Strifing with Dirk Strider is just like strifing with the Brobot he made you while it was set on novice mode.

Really fucking gay.

If you let him lie on you after he's pinned you it's only because you're trying to catch your breath and because, in all honesty, pushing him off seems like a herculean task. If you let him intertwine his fingers with yours when you go in for a hi five it's only because you don't want him embarrassed over misreading your signals (because he's unbearable to deal with when he makes a mistake). If you jump and lose your cool when he breathes on your neck, grabs at your waist, pulls your hair, kisses you hard and furious, pinches your cheek or touches your stomach with his freezing hands it's only because it's really really weird.

But if you're really honest with yourself, you're just passive. It's not sexual tension, teenage hormones or latent homosexual lust. You're just passive.

Even though you can't really care less about a relationship with anyone, let alone Dirk Strider (everything is great in theory when you dream about Hollywood alien ladies but in practice you're not sure whether you'd be able to even hold Neyteri's pinky) (in fact, the thought of a relationship with Dirk Strider made you feel slightly queasy and you're not sure why. It feels cheap and fake and weird weird weird. But you push it all aside) you ask him out regardless. Unlike Jane (and you're not sure how exactly you got the deal with her so wrong! It turned out she didn't like you at all but you were sure the signs were all there. Janey would never lie to you about something so important though so you trust she told you the truth.) he said yes automatically.

You like to think your relationship hasn't changed all that much, despite the label.

The stupid fucking robot used to try and kiss you too.

Everything is fine. He gets the picture after the seventeenth time and stops trying to initiate anything that makes you squirm in confusion (which is quite a lot of things ranging from ass slapping to mildly romantic conversations about daisy chains.) and he sticks to what he's good at.

Which happens to be everything.

You don't mind. Sure you always liked making robots. Your grandma was excellent at some types of mechanics and you learnt a lot from reading her notes over and over again until the green and blue crayola pencil marks blurred into bleary triangles and stars. When Dirk told you he liked making things too, you were delighted at finally having someone who cared for your interests (Janey tried, bless her, but it never worked). You showed him a circuit board and he showed you Squarewave.

  
You like fighting as does he. You know you need training against humans (or robots) and he made you Brobot (and you couldn't have ever done something to that level before and it makes you wish you could read bright colours better) which was wonderful. Even though you know he fights them on kill mode and must have won every time or he, well, would be dead, and you couldn't even beat the bloody thing on intermediate.

(You don't know if you can beat it on novice mode. You've never finished a strife. The robot wasn't built to be nice to you so when it tries to cut you some slack it feels unnatural and wrong and you're sure it's just because it looks so much like Dirk and that you're really messed up in your ideals of romance and that is why it seems like it's courting you.)

But you don't mind. Honestly.

You don't.

 

 

 

At least you don't until one day, you swap weapons. The monsters are easy to beat and with two of you, it's not that risky to try it.

You stab yourself in the foot and need him to stitch you up while you wail.

He gets a headshot.

 

 

 

You start to suspect that he's trying to one you up.

If you manage to rattle the bones of a skeletal monster, he has to slaughter two preferably larger ones. If you collect a piece of grist then Dirk has to collect ten. He has to go first into every tomb and ruin the surprise, he has to dodge every single on of your bullets, every single one of your punches, and he has to be the one to stitch you up, even if you can handle the most recent stab wound or black eye.

If you thought a little more about it, you'd probably be rather disturbed at your dual position of being both his boyfriend and his newest (shittiest, most prone to malfunctioning) fighting robot. The difference between him kissing you and hitting you is starting to get far too blurred. What you're really irked at however is that you can never beat him.

You're starting to wonder if this is all some sort of game. Maybe your mind is playing tricks on you (isolation is meant to drive you crazy but you feel more and more bonkers the longer you spend in Dirk Strider's company) but you believe this might have always been the case.

You've never told yourself any lies about the state of your relationship romantically; it's a farce, through and through. The idea of being with him was oh so great when he lived over four hundred years in the future and all you had was a message client and a robot but it has long since lost it's luster. You're starting to believe that your friendship with him was a ruse too.

You must pose yourself the question of whether or not your friendship with him is just some way to fuel his ego. You're obviously the least intelligent of your friends and you've seen it from the start because as inferior as you are you're still not actually stupid. You hate reading (the colours were always so bright but for the last few years they've hurt your head something terribly and to be honest what's the point in reading when you're never going to do anything anyway) and your syntax is left in a disarray that makes Jane cringe to the point where you feel bad for talking to her on your off days for the amount of work she must have to put in to even figure out what nonsense you're spouting. Roxy would be able to read your grandmother's notes and make sense of them in an instant and she can shoot better than you and could even back when she was inebriated. And Dirk.

Dirk is Dirk.

Dirk cannot prove himself against the girls. One that would be most ungentlemanly of him to do so! And two he'd fail. You're sure of it.

You want to see him fail more than you want to see yourself succeed some days.

 

 

 

The puzzles on LOMAX are difficult.

You suppose they are meant to be. Aranea always said your powers would take much hard work and time to flourish and you suppose the puzzles are the hard work aspect while the sheer amount of hours you remain stumped over them is the time aspect.

You don't have that many hours to work with however. You only allow yourself to work on the harder puzzles while you are on watch, using one hand to flick dials on the stone fixtures and the other hand to hold on to the guns by your side in case of rude arrival. You're not sure Dirk even sleeps but he is turned away from you so you presume that his hair is too thick for the eyes in the back of skull to scour you.

You don't want to ask for help. That would be like admitting that you are not capable of realising your own potential without Dirk there to hold your hand which you most certainly are. You just need time and silence and your overbearing paramour not breathing down your neck, impatiently giving you the answers before you can come up with them yourself.

You can feel your eyelids drooping though and you are so very weary of this day. You always work better in the morning but Dirk is always awake then and you never get a minute's peace. You yawn, stretch, and decide that you are not going to sleep until you figure this out You can do it. You're by no means hopeless.

Dirk wakes soon after and doesn't question how you have chosen to occupy yourself. He just leans over your shoulder and moves the dial, locking it in place correctly with such ease it makes your stomach drop.

You start to doubt your earlier assurances.

 

 

 

You think you feel oxygen on your skin one day and you take off your gas mask without a second thought.

He screams at you loud enough that you can hear it though his gas mask and it makes you start, dropping your own. You don't see him move but it's caught and slammed on to your face before you can even react. You can feel the bruise forming across the bridge of your nose where the brunt of the impact was.

You realise you're not breathing and try to before dropping down with a hiccup that's lost inside metal and plastic. You think Dirk is looking at you and his hand is still wrapped around the shoulder of your cardigan and you think he might be shaking. Or maybe that's you.

He speaks and whatever tone it's said in is lost through the hiss of air through the ventilation. "You're an idiot."

And you believe him.

 

 

 

You accept that Dirk is better than you.

Frankly you're not sure why you put so much time and effort into proving it a fallacy. You always knew it to be true. But just because you knew it didn't mean you had to be happy about it. You let him go into tombs ahead of you and you allow him to push you out of the way when a monster attacks. Over time you stop feeling angry that he thinks you need protecting and start feeling useless because he's right.

Until it's eight in the evening and you've lost track of the days a long time ago, stopped checking because that's what Dirk is there for, to stop you forgetting things and doing things you shouldn't be doing but he told you it was the thirteenth of February when you didn't ask and you don't want to ask why he told you because you've probably just forgotten something important again and you'd rather not face it.

That being said, it hadn't been a bad day. You went further down into one of the underground tombs than you'd ever been before and Dirk let you go in first, once he'd checked it was all clear of course. There was no danger, no skeletal monsters and no desire to rip your gas mask off to actually feel something in your chest and on one hand that should be disappointing for an adventurer but on the other hand Dirk had no reason to chide or nag or complain or fret or cling or or.

He's working on something. You've been fiddling on your phone, not sure if you have anything to update the girls with or whether you'd be bothering them by telling them your adventures of the day. You play Snake instead and then Solitaire and then you look up to take a gander at what Dirk is doing.

It takes you approximately a heartbeat to recognise a processor between his legs and a screwdriver in his hand as he works it. It takes you seven heartbeats (faster faster) to realise what that is for.

  
He couldn't be. It isn't. It is.

Your throat is slightly dry as you glance around at the wiring around you. He wouldn't be so nonchalant. He'd know you'd protest to this. This is the sort of thing that stays secret, that he plans when you aren't watching and you can't object to until it's already in motion. This is not the sort of thing that he should be flourishing, half finished, in front of you.

You come to the realisation that you are not the only one who honestly, truly, underestimates Jake English.

And of course, your ability to recognise the parts you yourself assembled many moons ago.

(You pause for a beat before telling him to sleep. You'll keep watch.)

(You watch, instead, how he underestimates you once more and does as you ask.)

(And then you run.)

 

 


End file.
